DVD-Rom vs. CD-Rom

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brian Ferrell
  • Start date Start date
B

Brian Ferrell

New member
I know DVD can contain more info than CD-ROM, but for speed of software loading, wouldn't it be better to have a 52x CD-ROM drive than a 10x DVD? Which would be better for home recording? Of course, if you have a 32x12x10 burner to go along with the DVD drive, you'd still be able to use the burner to load software at 32x right?

Brian F.
 
any sort of hibrid cd-rom device is going to lack in the read speed department.. if you play games , or are really impatient when it comes to installing software , then the 52x drive would be important to you.. if neither is an issue , then a dvd-rom or cd-rw's 32x read speed will be fine..

- eddie -
 
OK, Thanks! I really don't know about how long it takes to load software, since I haven't gotten my PC yet, but from the way you describe it, it doesn't sound like it takes very long- even at 10x DVD rate. Why is the CD-ROM better for gaming?

Brian F.
 
Hang on now. All DVD drives will read CD media, and read it at a faster rate than DVD. It is not uncommon that a 10X DVD drive will read CDROM's at 40X or better.

I'm also not sure that you can compare the X rating of a DVD drive to CDROM. There's a whole lot more information on a DVD than on a CD...so spinning the disc slower could still result the same amount or even more data actually being read.

If I was to buy a new CDROM drive today... I'd opt for a reasonable DVD drive, just to have the technology since it's become relatively cheap....

And perhaps some day it will replace CDROM for data storage and CDA for audio (pray pray pray).

And, BTW, there are DVD RAM drives available for creating your own DVD's...they're expensive though. Hey, does anyone know if they can also write CD Audio? I'm guessing yes.

Just remember, 10X DVD doesn't mean that it'll only read CDROM's at 10X.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slackmaster is correct. The 10x in this case refers to "10 times the speed of ..the original DVD spec." Check the packaging of the DVD drive and it will say what the speed is for reading CD-ROMs. Most DVD drives I have seen are about 32x for CDs.

A CD-R can work fine as a general purpose drive in a system when you can only fit one drive. What I have heard is that the read/write head on a CDR is heavier than the read head on a CD-ROM, and because of this will go out of alignment (i.e. throw out the drive) faster than a regular CD-ROM if you use it a lot. So if you are going to be playing a lot of games you will shorten the life of your CDR. However I have not had any experiance to support this theory. Where I work we use our CDR drives pretty hard, and after about a year they usually need to be replaced anyways.
 
like they said.. a 10x dvd-rom usually can read regular cd-roms at 32x or higher..

im not really a gamer , but supposedly you need a fast cd-rom drive because the game is very oftenly reading from the drive , and a slow drive will affect performance.. yeah..that makes sense.. :)

- eddie -
 
OK, thanks again, guys. Looks like I'll be opting for DVD--- and feel GOOD about it!

Brian F.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top